Oven Grease: How To Clean It

The oven is one of the most often-used appliances in the kitchen, and yet so many people either don’t know how to clean it, or just don’t want to tackle the task because it is a messy job. But the fact of the matter is, if you don’t clean up the grease inside your oven, it is not only going to get worse the more you leave it, it’s rather unsightly, to say the least, to say nothing of it being a fire hazard because so much carbon has built up over time.

Ideally, we’d clean up a greasy mess when it happens, saving ourselves considerable elbow grease—and of course, the time spent having to inhale the vapours from a particularly smelly, and dangerous, chemical.

However, if you have left the grease too long, and you’re finally getting down to cleaning your oven, here are some tips to help you along with the process:

Keep Your Oven Style In Mind

Many modern ovens are, at the very least, textured, or continuous-cleaning, if not self-cleaning, which means that your oven has a layer of porcelain designed to burn food spills away while you’re baking. If you have a self-cleaning oven, this is easiest to deal with, as you’ll have a feature that allows you to turn up the heat as high as possible so that all built up grease gets turned to ash. If you don’t have either of these models, you’re going to have to clean your oven by hand.

Manual Cleaning

Let’s assume for the moment that you have a rather old-fashioned model oven—the kind that is not self-cleaning or textured. Many people do, so what you want to do is pull the racks out first and set them to soaking in the sink with some detergent. Next, make a mixture of baking soda and water mixture (56.7 g of soda) in a four-litre spray bottle. Shake the bottle to help the soda to dissolve.

Making sure the oven is cold, spray down the inside of the oven with the mixture, concentrating on the heaviest areas. If your oven is especially dirty, make a paste with the baking soda, instead of a spray, and spread the paste in the most charred areas. Wait an hour before attempting to remove the carbon and charred grease.

If the baking soda and water method does not suffice, then you may have to go to a commercial oven cleaner spray. These can be harsh on your lungs, so make sure your kitchen is well-ventilated.

Once you’ve gotten your oven all cleaned up, from this point on, it’s often wise to take preventative measures to make sure your next oven cleaning isn’t as big a chore.